At the Bottom of Everything (29 page)

From:

To:

Date:
Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 9:14 PM

Subject:
(no subject)

Hey. Reassure me the phone line isn’t dead, OK? I can’t tell if it’s me being paranoid or an actual change (me being paranoid’s usually a pretty good bet), but I’ve been getting a weird feeling. Things are good/normal with me.

From:

To:

Date:
Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 8:44 PM

Subject:
re: greetings

Adam—

I hope this finds you well. Your mother tells us you’ve got a serious girlfriend—this is, I know, just the kind of thing twentysomethings most like for their friends’ parents to discuss in the lobbies of movie theaters. Anyway, bring her by the house sometime and we promise to feed you well and embarrass you minimally.

Some fretful Thomas news—he’s still in the hospital, but lately threatening to check himself out (Kafka ghostwrote the laws regarding committing an adult against his will, I’m fairly sure). Also—and please don’t repeat this to him, since he seems to have taken his correspondence with you as one of his refuges from all the medico-parental aspects of his life—his doctor told us this morning that he
seems not to be taking his pills. Unsure how new a development this is, but alarm bells are jangling in Sally and me. He’s had the usual litany of complaints with the pills—fuzzy-headedness, bloatedness, etc.—but they were seeming to do the job, taking the more worrisome items off his mental menu. And lately those items have been creeping back, so we’d already been concerned: lots of ordinary words used in unordinary ways—
becoming, seeing, falling, opening
. Mainly it’s been a look, though, which I’m sure you became acquainted with in India—a strong impression of having his thoughts on matters over the horizon, which is, the doctors tell us, precisely the wrong place for them to be.

We’ve already imposed on you more than anyone could reasonably—or unreasonably—ask, but I wonder if you’d be willing to keep writing to him, visiting him, etc., and if you could—if you think it’s warranted—reassure us about whether there’s been a change, whether the story seems to you about to tip back into crisis. We’ve come to trust your vision in all this much more than our own, and to a certain extent even more than the doctors’. I think there’s a sport in making authority figures wring their hands, and Thomas has become all too skilled at it. My sense is that there’s less nonsense between the two of you, and that you might be able to tell us whether this is the sort of thing that could be cleared up with some family sessions and pharmacological tweaks, or if it’s something, again, entirely other.

Fretfully,

Richard

From:

To:

Date:
Wed, May 5, 2010 at 5:07 PM

Subject:
(no subject)

Hey. You probably already know this but I tried visiting you yesterday. The desk person told me you or your doctors had put in a no-visitors note, which is totally fine, of course, but I just wanted to make sure you’re all right. Things are good with me. It’s Sonia’s birthday, so about to spend a painful amount of money on dinner. Let me know how you’re doing.

From:

To:

Date:
Sun, May 9, 2010 at 1:15 PM

Subject:
re: (no subject)

Adam,

I’m grateful for your emails, for your visits, I understand the feeling of duty, I don’t dismiss it, I only hope you realize the things my parents tell you are not the actual matters, they talk to doctors, gorge on gossip, the only course is to nod and murmur and keep things simple, life as a series of chores, a list to be dispatched, one second after another. I’m not complaining, not entirely complaining, their concern is misguided but not malicious, I was going to go home, but now I won’t, the being watched is too much, and the simplicity here does me good, it keeps me settled, I don’t feel fears, the fears I feel are not so full of hidden edges, the last drops of medicine will be out of me soon. What I want to tell you, the only thing I want to tell you, is not for my parents, is not to reassure
you, I won’t be living an ordinary life, renting an apartment, tiptoeing around what happened in India, riding the Metro, telling people all is well. We did a terrible thing, I won’t say accident, we owe it to her not to waste it. What I want to say is that for the first twenty-seven years of our lives we were asleep, we were having bad dreams. Sleep is a vault, we dream inside it, weaving what sense we can from the scratches, the scrapes that make it to us from outside. I hope, I trust, your dreams are better now. I know you’re happy, I read your letters, I’ve seen your eyes, your trimmed nails, your shirts that someone else picked out. What you felt in the cave, I held your limbs as they twitched, was the moment in a dream when the noise outside becomes too loud, your eyelids flutter, your machinery falters, you grunt but don’t speak, and then you slip back into the dream but at another angle. I did die in the cave, I know that now, I was empty after that, the person you saw was not the person you knew, my parents, my doctors, even, I’m sorry, you, Adam, you’ve been calling into a tunnel and having conversations with the echoes. I knew it when Guruji died, you didn’t have to tell me, I felt the change, I’d been waiting and it came, and now I’m learning, relearning, what I have to do, but you don’t have to worry, you can keep living, keep writing, keep sitting on your rainy beach and saying “gut-bomb” and feeling more or less happy, I wouldn’t blame you for it. But I just want to tell you, if you do change your mind, if questions catch hold of you, if you can bring yourself, after everything, to trust me, that your quietest doubts are right, and that what seems, on sleepless nights, not to be a life in fact is not. I want to say there’s more, there’s always more, for you to do: it will feel like waking up.

1.  The story opens with a focus on Adam and his two most recent relationships. How are his relationships with Claire and Anna similar/different?

2.  Looking back, how has “the incident” impacted the rest of Adam’s life? His relationships? His career?

3.  What made Thomas and Adam become friends in the first place? How were they the same? How were they different?

4.  Adam spends most of his time at the Pells’ house while in middle school. How much of his friendship with Thomas is based on his interest in Thomas, and how much is his desire to be a part of the Pell family?

5.  How are the Pells different from Adam’s mother and stepfather? Do you think the Pells made/shaped Thomas, or did they simply embrace and support his “differentness”?

6.  Adam and Thomas react in opposite ways to stressful situations: conflicts in school, the police approaching on the train tracks, and, of course, the accident. Discuss the different ways Thomas and Adam react.

7.  How do you think you would react in a situation like “the incident”? What if you were in ninth grade?

8.  Thomas and Adam’s friendship deteriorates after the accident. Do you think they would have stayed friends if it had never happened?

9.  Did you have friends in school that you no longer see or speak to? Is there anyone who you were close to in your life that you’ve lost touch with that you would drop everything for? Why did you lose touch?

10.   Who was Adam helping when he went to India? Thomas? The Pells? Himself?

11.   When Adam initially tells of his meeting Thomas, he says, “what set Thomas apart, I think, was that he somehow managed, in his hundred-pound body and New Balance sneakers, to give the impression of being
wise”
(page 12). Do you think Thomas’s search for wisdom and transcendence are based solely in his guilt? Was he on the path to something higher before the accident, and would he still have taken that direction had the accident never happened?

12.   The teachings of Sri Prabhakara promise Thomas transcendence based on a certain removal of personal conscience/consciousness. Would Thomas have reached out to the Batras without this impetus?

13.   Should Thomas have gone to the Batras’ house in India? Was his confession for himself or for the Batras? Who do you think it helped? Does Adam, who didn’t admit anything, get anything out of the encounter?

14.   Why does Adam go after Thomas in the first place? Why does he continue to try to find him after meeting the Batras?

15.   Adam’s ordeal in getting to the cave shows him to be tenacious and determined, the first we have seen this behavior from him. Discuss where this focus might have come from.

16.   What happens in the shaft in the cave? Hallucinations from dehydration? Temporary insanity? Transcendence of consciousness?

17.   After their rescue from the cave, Adam returns to a “normal” life. Do you think things have fundamentally changed for him? How is he different, and how different is he?

18.   Adam calls Charles Lowe (the other driver) to confess what the boys had done. Do you think this will help either one of them in the long run?

19.   Thomas does not return to a “normal” life. Is there a “normal” for someone like Thomas? Is he crazy? What does “recovery” mean to someone like him?

20.   The fourth part of the novel (post-India) is written completely in emails from Adam to Thomas. Why? Does the wordless communication they developed in the cave still exist? Is that what Adam tells himself to feel better? How does Thomas’s lack of communication affect those around him?

21.   Based on his last email, what do you think will happen to Thomas?

22.   To what does the title refer, besides the physical aspect of the shaft in the cave?